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Comment by nonethewiser | Hacker News Reader

>I feel like too little attention is given in this post to the problem of automated troll armies to influence the public's perception of reality.

I guess I just view bad information as a constant. Like bad actors in cybersecurity, for example. So I mean yeah... it's too bad. But not a surprise and not really a variable you can control for. The whole premise of a Democracy is that people have the right to vote however they want. There is no asterisk to that in my opinion.

I really dont see how 1 person 1 vote can survive this idea that people are only as good as the information they receive. If that's true, and people get enough bad information, then you can reasonably conclude that people shouldn't get a vote.

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> I guess I just view bad information as a constant. Like bad actors in cybersecurity, for example. So I mean yeah... it's too bad. But not a surprise and not really a variable you can control for.

Ban bots from social media and all other speech platforms. We agree that people ought to have freedom of speech. Why should robots be given that right? If you want to express an opinion, express it. If you want to deploy millions of bots to impersonate human beings and distort the public square, you shouldn’t be able to.

Easier said than done.

By all means yes, for the clear case of propaganda bots, ban them. The problem is there will still be bots. And there is a huge gray area - many of the cases aren't clear. I think its just an intractable problem. People are going to have to deal with it.

> Ban bots from social media and all other speech platforms.

I would agree with that, but how do you do it? The problem is that as the bots become more convincing it becomes harder to identify them to ban them. I only see a couple options.

One is to impose crushing penalties on whatever humans release their bots onto such platforms, do a full-court-press enforcement program, and make an example of some offenders.

The other is to ban the bots entirely by going after the companies that are running them. A strange thing about this AI frenzy is that although lots of small players are "using AI", the underlying tech is heavily concentrated in a few major players, both in the models and in the infrastructure that runs them. It's a lot harder for OpenAI or Google or AWS to hide than it is for some small-time politician running a bot. "Top-down" enforcement that shuts down the big players could reduce AI pollution substantially. It's all a pipe dream though because no one has the will to do it.

I like this idea. The problem isn’t free speech it’s the money which gives monied interests vastly disproportionate weight.

What if we banned the technologies that enable bots in the first place?

Remove the precursor, remove the problem.

Maybe, but I think still the enforcement of that would need to be targeted at the large players. Also I'm a bit leery of banning the knowledge itself. I wouldn't want to ban research on such matters, for instance. The problem is the proliferation of that technology in the public sphere. So treat it like hazardous materials, drugs, etc.

Why do we even need bot technology in the first place? Some future dream that never materializes? Nope. Just ban the technology.

You can do it but you won't like the answer. Link social media accounts real ID, you'll be able to spot the bots because one real person is associated to hundreds of posts a minute.

Going that dystopian extreme wouldn't help. Simply rent real IDs from poor people at cheap rates to be your sock-puppet and you have even more convincing bullshit from bots. Sapient actors aren't so easily solved.

The voting becomes a health-check for the information. We shouldn't revoke the rights of the individual based on arbitrary information they may or may not receive.

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